Here you will find nonsense about thrifting, vintage, wandering, my adventures in antique mall reselling, and St Louis. And various other nonsense, as my whims take me.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Words, words words - and they're all mine!

Last week I picked up a friend a little earlier than I usually do, so with a bit of time to kill, we stopped by the Goodwill Outlet that's nearly under highway 40 off Vandeventer. It just opened last Spring here in St Louis, and I checked it out pretty quickly after it opened, but hadn't been back. The concept is amazing - everything is sold by the pound, dirt cheap - but there are obvious drawbacks. First of all, it's an outlet, which means what's there is what failed to sell at... Goodwill. Secondly, everything is just piled into giant bins that are then rolled out onto the floor in rows as they're ready at which point, at least in my limited observation, people swarm them. So breakage is not uncommon.

Still, we had a little time to kill, and I have a thrift fetish, so I gave it another shot. We found a few little things - some yarn I might use eventually and a picture on canvas I thought I might play around with modifying, and a few vintage books, but here is the pièce de résistance:

Websters New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language.

Can you believe this sexy thing? I mean seriously, it's so big, it's bound with big long bolts!:

Check out the gorgeous endpapers!

It's the unabridged 1956 version, and it's so chock-full of goodness it makes me giddy. There are thick full color pages at the front with illustrations of various random things - a page of reptiles, a page of trees, a page of minerals, etc. The back cover is missing, but with over 2000 pages of words and hundreds of pages of appendices after that, it will take me years to get that far anyway - there's too much good that comes before it! And there are lots of illustrations alongside the definitions as well:

So many words, so little time....

My favorite new word from the pages shown above:

"gulinular, c. Of or relating to a gulinula."

What is a gulinula, you ask? Why I just happen to have that information right here handy as well!:

"gulinula, n. In zoology, the stage of development of an actinozoan at which the gullet is formed."

I bet you can guess what the next word I looked up was! But if you don't have your very own copy of the complete, unabridged Webster's dictionary, you'll have to sign up for a free trial of the online version to view the full definition of the exact word. Poor you and your limited internet!